2025 Runners-Up I: Peter Hujar at Raven Row
Peter Hujar at Raven Row: Washing Away the Stink of Sadness
by Sunny Sunday
The black-and-white photography of Peter Hujar stinks of sweet rot and human decay. The natural deterioration of life is on full display at London’s Raven Row in the Eyes Open in the Dark exhibit where photographs of dilapidated loft interiors, ramshackle backstage dressing rooms, and trash can pavements hang in stark contrast to the creme interiors of the austere gallery.
The New Jersey-born, New York City-raised photographer knew how to capture ruin, documenting his version of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. His subjects were often singular, young, queer, vulnerable, and unconventional, much like himself. Through gelatin silver and pigmented ink prints, Hujar’s work presents a grand game of dress-up, capturing dancers, performers, and drag queens, both in full decor and stripped down bare.
Hujar was a child of abandonment, abuse, and regular relocation. His father left before his birth, and though he tried to find him later in life, he was unsuccessful. He was initially raised by his Ukranian-speaking grandparents in New Jersey before his grandmother passed away. At this point, he moved in with his alcoholic mother and stepfather and spent just five years living in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment before leaving, at age 16, to find his own way.
He was an angry person, which badly impacted his career, and in turn, caused him further anger. “He’d cause scenes, slam down phones, break things (mostly his own) […] One night I said something wrong and he smashed a wooden chair to pieces, screaming and ranting while I stood trembling nearby,” writer Vince Aletti told The Village Voice in 1987. The two grew close in the 10 years they lived across the street from one another, before Hujar’s death. “I began to think of Peter as the angriest person I knew, and even in sunnier times, it became impossible not to sense the black mood waiting to engulf him just around the bend.”
In one self-portrait dated 1980, Hujar faces the camera, torso bare and fingers intertwined. A string around his neck blends into his downy chest hair. It’s difficult to hold his gaze. A sense of real-time perception is evident behind his indescribable eyes. All at once, he is composed, animalistic, knowing, and intense, and one can momentarily imagine him lashing out.
The amount of fame and recognition Hujar received over his lifetime was lackluster. His last show in January 1986 procured low sales and scarce reviews. Almost exactly a year later, he was diagnosed with AIDs and 11 months after that, he passed away.
On the first floor of the exhibit, we are presented with Hujar’s death in three images positioned above a fireplace. They were captured by his partner David Wojnarowicz moments after his passing. The air in this room stands still. On the other three walls, images of Hujar and his past lovers are framed, young and brimming with vitality. They seem to remind and comfort the viewer. Still, above the fireplace, his death is jarring, manifest in his unfocused eyes, open mouth, darkly tinted fingernails, and sideways-lolling feet. He left the world surrounded by friends in Room 1423, the same hospital room where he photographed a friend, a trans woman, Candy Darling on her deathbed 14 years prior.
After climbing up one more floor, I find myself in a room lined with photographs of water and release a breath I didn’t know I was holding in. It’s late 1975 and early 1976 again, a time in which Hujar reemerged from a clenching depressive period and found a marked revival in his work. Commissioned for a chapel at Fordham University, the six images of the Hudson and the East River are portrayed in alternating order. The viewer is transported between Manhattan’s two flanks in flickers, like light cast off the ripples of moving water. These are some of the last photographs on display, and it feels suitable to remember Hujar this way – the anger, the failure, and the disease washed away in choppy liquid layers.
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Target audience: An accessible and relatable publication, such as Plaster Magazine, the “art magazine that won’t hurt your head.”
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‘Peter Hujar at Raven Row: Washing Away the Stink of Sadness’ by Sunny Sunday is the Runner-Up in the Review Category of the 2025 Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist Awards. Sunny is a student at the London College of Communication within UAL, working toward her MA in Arts and Lifestyle Journalism. She has written for Musée Magazine, the Budapest Business Journal, and other small, independent publications.
This post is the third of a series of the winners and runners-up in 2025